Go ahead, relax

How does it feel when a load is suddenly lifted from you? An exceptionally heavy load, although all loads must seem exceptionally heavy when you have long carried them. Then, suddenly, no load, no weight at all. It has to feel odd at first. What's the first thought upon waking? Well that's over. Whew!  Or is it, help! What do I do now?  Do you imagine a phantom load similar to the phantom limbs amputees describe?

The puddly sight of deflated balloons, of ordinary water inside a pressure cooker when the lid is removed. The sky after a furious storm. The gradually slower rocking of the sea in the wake of a passing ship. A sigh. Releasing a brake to let something - a car, a bike, a machine - begin to roll. The last piece of a puzzle. The test result you've been waiting for. Admittance of guilt. The curtain rising, the curtain falling. The denouement of a story.

In nature, when surface rocks are weathered or eroded, the rock underneath experiences a reduction in pressure that allows them to expand and results in fractures that can be beautiful or dangerous. Melting glaciers cause the same thing. When a loved one dies after a long illness, caregivers endure a complicated grief. Relief that it's finally over, guilt because of feeling relieved. Life may look empty without all those needs to tend to, it may be hard to move on.

Deflated balloons, no fun. Pressure cooker lid off, supper is ready. The sky after a furious storm, beautiful. The gradually slower rocking of the sea in the wake of a ship, calm. Releasing a brake gets you going. The last piece of a puzzle, satisfaction. The test result you have been waiting for....hmm, depends on the result but at least you've got it. Admittance of guilt, relief. The curtain rising, at last the show begins. The curtain falling, it's over. The denouement of a story, almost home.

Gimme Shelter!

A troubling realization that came out of the discussion ignited by my 1992 novel Centre/Center, at my most recent Travelling Book Café, was how Canada has changed since the 1970's when war objectors and even deserters from the U.S. armed forces were welcomed with kindness by the government and any number of open-hearted individuals who provided shelter, offered jobs, donated food and clothes, extended friendship.

     It was standing room only at the Gibsons Public Library late Saturday afternoon. I had invited three former U. S. War Objectors to join me at the front, and after introducing "the times" with a short reading from Centre/Center, which deals with the migration to Canada during the Vietnam war years, the men described their experiences. Dan Bouman, a former town councillor and head of the district conservation society, talked about how his decision to cross the border influenced his family in Michigan; how, despite criticism from a local church minister and a threatening call from the FBI, his army veteran father began to understand that Dan had made the right decision. He was welcomed and aided by the Quakers in Vancouver. He thought then and still thinks of Canada as a place of refuge. Ken Dalgleish, a popular piano player, remembered the various people who helped him along, from a California Induction Center doctor willing to believe that Ken had been suffering chronic headaches, to an immigration officer who told him: If you want to stay we'd like to welcome you. Dr. Michael Klein detailed his Ionesco-like exchanges with the military board and showed a film now mounted at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.  In the film Klein describes how he and his wife were advised to cross from New York to Montreal at night when French Canadian border guards would be on duty, French Canadians having been historically opposed to conscription. There is also a sequence about the difficulty Iraq war resisters have experienced because nowadays, instead of welcoming immigrants for humanitarian reasons, the present government gives preferential treatment to entrepreneurs promising to invest in other businesses or open their own.  Meantime, war objectors like Rodney Watson have to seek sanctuary in churches to avoid being sent back to the U.S.  All three speakers had commented on Canada's traditional place in the world as a haven. Acknowledging the new reality produced a mixture of emotions and shame was a major component. So it wasn't just about nostalgia, all the talk, but living history that gives us an opportunity to consider how Canadian society has evolved.
     This Travelling Book Café confirmed that the Vietnam War era remains unfinished business for many who were touched by it. The time was too limited to allow all the audience members who had been involved as war objectors, or soldiers then veterans (as is one of the characters in C/C) to tell their stories. Those who did, including Dan Bouman, were grateful. "It's the first time I have ever talked about my experience in public and the first time anyone asked me to."
     There are clearly more to speak and to be heard. The Centre/Center Travelling Book Café hits the road in mid-February, willing to stop in interested communities along the way. Quebec and Ontario in late February, early March.

Also Known As: the name game

Funny how topics tend to cluster in life and in the mind. Lately it's been names and naming. The annual list of the most common baby names appeared in the news media, Olivia and Liam coming out as the most popular where I live. Will parents who choose these names hand their kids the challenge of distinguishing themselves from other Olivia's and Liam's? Because names do make a first impression and bring with them all sorts of baggage. Wayne? Oh you don't look like a Wayne.

Italica (M.B., 2008)

     Homer names some of the fallen and those who felled them in The Iliad, and goes further to provide a sense of lineage. Zeus is the son of Kronos and the father of Sarpedon, old Nestor the son of Peleus and father of Antilochos and a second son. Other descriptions are rather general, mighty Aias, the famous spearman Odysseus, bronze-armoured Hektor, handsome Paris a.k.a Alexandros. That's the thing about the names in classic and also Russian literature, it is common to find more than one name for the same character, so clarity is sacrificed for, what? Local colour or customs? Homer feels it important to identify the battlers by name, but he realizes that he can't include everyone, not with the masses necessary for the slaughter that goes on between the gates of Troy and the fast ships of the Achaians, or Argives or Danaans, the other names by which the Greeks are known. Choose your favourite handle. Instead, in his catalog of ships he names most of the leaders. The way he refers to them suggests that his audience must have known who he was talking about, at least their reputations, otherwise why bother. What's in a name?
     The chronicler who accompanies the Pasha on an attempt to expand the Ottoman Empire into Albania instinctively realizes that names are only a beginning. He needs to note some characteristic of the principle players to distinguish them in the history he is writing of the the siege, in the novel by the same name, The Siege, by Ismail Kadare. It was great of Kadare to include such a character, someone whose very purpose in his fictional life is to describe, to chronicle events. You'd think there would have to have been similar functionaries in all wars, perhaps poets like Homer, though Homer purportedly got his material from oral tradition, for the war he wrote about happened in the 13th century BCE, say scholars, and The Iliad is said to have first appeared in the 8th century BCE. You know those games of telephone, where one persons whispers something to someone else

and by the end of the line the original message is distorted? Makes you wonder about the oral tradition. Too bad Homer could not draw on the work of a chronicler like the Sultan sent along with his troops.
   This last thought tempts me to open the Pandora's box of historical accuracy and fiction, but that's for another time. Today it's names that cluster in random thoughts and another reference comes to mind from the classic WW II poem, Naming of Parts by John Reed.  Reed speaks in the voice of a soldier who is learning the parts of his gun, but the brilliance is in his juxtaposition of the names of spring flowers - japonica, almond blossom - and "lower swing swivel" and "cocking piece," two of the parts of his gun, i.e. the exuberant beauty and promise of new life the image of flowers produces contrasted with the utilitarian names that apply to an instrument used for killing.
     I like the sound of words and found a way to make a sort of poetry out of the names of tools in sculptor Geoffrey Smedley's workshop.  Meaning and language play into his metaphorical machines, to all the parts of which he gives names. A ball that rolls down a chute, for example, is called The Seed of Intention, another part Confession, another Double Derogators.
     Olivia? Liam?  For many years Michael came out on top for boys. In fact one semester in my classroom I had so many that I called them the Mike section, which immediately stripped them of their individuality, at least briefly, and that wasn't fair because you really cannot assume that similarly named people have the same characteristics. Maybe a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but what about the fragrance of all the girls named Rose?

Struggle?

Most constant readers will have heard of the six-volume work by Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle. Those who have not yet dipped or plunged into it, however, should know that the struggle does not apply to the writing or reading. Knausgaard appears to write effortlessly, fluidly, a rhythmic prose that has reeled this reader in and held her for two of the thick volumes. As for the life he documents in careful detail, well that is often a struggle; avoiding his father's anger, dealing with the disgusting aftermath of his death; so struck by the rejection of a girl that he self-harms, as it is called in current parlance, literally cuts himself.

     I like the way he plays with my attention. At one point he fixes it on the scene at a tawdry amusement park where he and his family have stopped after having left the home of friends who were not used to young children. Everyone's hot and the baby starts wailing, for no apparent reason, unless he's been stung by a wasp. But nothing dramatic happens, in fact there is little conventional drama in the 700 pages I have read so far. Nothing and yet somehow everything happens. Daily life makes the ever ongoing foreground, with occasional time outs for literary musings and philosophical thoughts, deep discussions with his friend Geir. The forementioned cutting turns out not to have been deep enough to score Karl Ove's face; embarrassed by his extremes of feeling, he chalks it off to drunkeness. Not long after the amusement park incident he is writing about Dostoyevsky and the drama of the soul.
    While most writers of realism use at least some material from their own lives, My Struggle is deliberately autobiographical. I heard Knausgaard say in an interview that basically everything is true.  The characters are actual people identified by their real names, as are the places he refers to. It is unlikely that he would be walking around the world with a notebook or a recorder of some kind, but he's a wizard with details and dialogue. And he doesn't merely report. He relates the yellow and grey of a restaurant's decor, the grey green white of a landscape to the use of colour in modern art. He has made enemies in Norway because of his honesty; yet the feel of truth makes the book compelling and not because of voyeurism. I don't know any of these people and for those of us who are in no danger of having his thoughts on our appearance or character or our relationships with him exposed, he is a sympathetic narrator. It has often been woman authors who use dailiness in their work. As a writer who has done that myself, aimed to depict the spectacle of so-called ordinary life, I have felt I must explain why I do it. But Knausgaard freely recounts what he made for dinner, how he cleaned the apartment or painted it, the neighbours, the activity on the street outside the balcony where he smokes and smokes, though by late in Volume 2  he realizes he's going to have to quit. His lungs are burning and his throat full of phlegm in the morning. When he and Linda fight, I wonder if this will be it for them while knowing perfectly well that in the last Wikipedia entry they are still together and now have four children. Portrait of a marriage day by day. The marriage of two highly charged people, too, or so Knausgaard's driving pace impels me to think of them.
     I don't know if I will read all six books. I wonder if he can keep me enthralled. Will his acute self-consciousness eventually seem like a pose? A strategy? Will I feel that he has overstayed his welcome?
     I do know that reading the first two volumes of My Struggle has returned me to my late teens and twenties when I was always excited about reading, when a good day meant a pile of unread books by my chair and nothing to stop me from opening them. I will order the third volume, maybe the fourth when it is translated. In between I will miss him; I will feel that I have I moved to a different country where Norwegian names are rarely spoken and no one debates the difference between Nordic countries, and if someone describes how he made dinner and poured a glass of wine for his wife and watched his baby sleeping on her back, the scene may not be as captivating as it is in the words of the often tortured, always questing Karl Ove Knausgaard, though he would surely cringe to hear it.

Two girls, two destinies

On Christmas day she opened her eyes for the first time since she had been beaten senseless and left naked in the snow on a First Nations reserve in northern Alberta five days before. Her alleged attacker, as the newscasters say, was arrested quickly, having been turned in by community members who knew him and perhaps his evil ways, too. But what he did has been done, and now that she is coming to consciousness, will she remember? How can her parents possibly explain? The police provide regular updates and report that the parents are doing the best they can, but that emotions are high because,"....you don't really expect this to happen. She's only six. She's never had any harm."

     A little further west, on the coast of British Columbia, another community is grieving another little girl, seven, who was buried by boulders that slid her off the trail where she was hiking with her mother and a group of adults and children who regularly hiked together. Gone, just like that, in virtual minutes, Erin Moore, whose pictures show a smiling, rosy-cheeked sprite who liked wearing dangly earrings, who sported a tutu and running shoes for bike rides around her small town. A freak, inexplicable accident.
     Both these tragedies occurred in the week before Christmas. School was out so Erin could join the Monday hiking group. There'd been snow so the unnamed six-year old had been tobagganing with other kids before she ran home to change out of her wet clothes.
     The juxtaposition of the two events has simmered in my mind all week. In 1920, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung introduced the theory of synchronicity, the idea that apparently coincidental events may not be causally related but related by meaning. Coincidences become meaningful by twigging something in the observer.
     The obvious meaning seems to be that tragedy doesn't play favourites, anyone can be struck anywhere, anytime. Family photos of the Moore's show a smiling, athletic, picture-book perfect foursome, the parents said to be an academic couple. To protect the other child's name, her family has not been introduced. Should she recover fully, as we all hope, she will want to escape the identity she is known by now, ie, the six-year old victim of violent sexual abuse. But if conditions on the Paul reserve are like conditions on First Nations reserves elsewhere in the north, housing is minimal, substance abuse problems rampant. What else could begin to explain the behaviour of her alleged attacker except the kind of madness brought on by drugs and alcohol?
     That tragedy can happen to anyone is a true-ism. Nor does the juxtaposition of the two sad events have much meaning as a warning to parents to keep their kids safe. Hiking, tobagganing? These are the sort of things parents should encourage not discourage.
     As a writer of stories, I often lean on technique to find my way to understanding. What point of view will best reveal the truths that must lie beneath? Which character will provide the best guide? Where to start, in the future and look back, having let time work to make everything clearer? Or begin in the past and lead up to the two separate days when the lives of two separate families changed forever?
     Both communities held candlelight vigils, one in memory; one for healing. But it's the explanation that eludes everyone, and in both cases, it would be just too hard to accept that fates like these are God's will. What kind of God would will such cruel fates? Karma? The result of a badly ruptured society?  Of an especially rainy fall, one consequence having been the minute movement of earth beneath a boulder that may have budged for the first time since the retreat of the glaciers when Erin Moore stepped on it?
     No answers, but respectful cheers to these two spunky spirits, remembering one; hoping for the other.

Yalda!

Sol sistere, the sun stands still for this the longest darkest night of the year. Persians celebrate it as Yalda. They eat pomegranates and watermelon, among other things, and recite poetry, maybe even something from the 11th century astronomer poet Omar Khayyam, who was all for celebrating.
            "Ah, my Beloved fill the Cup that clears, 
             To-day of past regret and future fears!" 
Yalda, Hanukkah, Christmas.... all anticipating, all saluting the gradual return of the light.
            "Awake!" says Omar, earlier in The Rubaiyat,
            "For Morning in the Bowl of Night
             Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight" 

In Concert

They're like a deck of black and white playing cards thrown across the gymnasium floor, these 13 to 18 year olds in plain black pants and plain white shirts, except for the dapper dark-haired sax player who also wears a waist-length black jacket and a black bow tie, lavender high tops.

Three rows of folding chairs for people too old or infirm or simply dissuaded by the bank of hard-seated bleachers behind where family groups and clots of friends arrange themselves at different heights, as if on a musical staff. Standard black music stands, wires snaking around the narrow polished floorboards to the wall plugs. Same lights glaring down as for basketball games and assemblies but bouncing back from the brass bells of horns tonight. A lanky crewcut blonde with a pale, spotted complexion stands at the mixing board, eyes darting from the levers he must adjust to the music master this evening, a wiry, animated man wearing a pink shirt. Now grimacing, now beaming, eyebrows raised high above the rims of his eyeglasses, waving his hands, keeping time with a foot, often bouncing, beckoning to various players to come forth with their parts, bring it up, pick it up. First, the junior band. A bad year for recruits on account of a teacher's strike that delayed the start of the school year, but the nine members include two girl trumpet players standing in back, and a girl in a wheelchair whose fist grasps one of various percussion instruments, a maraca, a stick of bells, and shakes it, sometimes strikes it on the tambourine held by the woman next to her chair, her aid. The girl's whole body jumps when she beats. Her smile stretches her face wide enough to draw her head down to her shoulder. Then the teacher introduces a fledgling conductor with blue hair who, if less animated than her mentor, nevertheless leads the junior concert band in a recognizable rendition of Vivaldi's "Fall." Turns out that she and the snappy sax player are dating.

     "Angels We Have Heard on High" is the warm-up number for the senior concert band of about twenty. The audience is invited to sing along, but it's a half-hearted invitation, perhaps obligatory, and elicits a half-hearted response. No one remembers the words. After some tuning up exercises, and scales that demonstrate the need for more precise tuning, come one of Dvorak's Slavonic dances and Gershwin's "American in Paris," the Reader's Digest version, explains the teacher-conductor, adding that it is the first time the concert band has played the piece through, from start to finish. The modern composition by a Mexican composer seems to have intrigued the players to the extent that it may be their best realized piece.
         When the jazz band steps into its separate space, the dapper sax player with the round boy's face, stands for a solo. The stone-faced kid behind the drum kit at the rear has natural flash, pro-drummer moves. Then one of the clarinet players from the concert band steps over to the mic to sing Elton John's, "Can You Feel the Love Tonight".  Tall, a white headband circling her hairline almost like a bandage, this teenage diva must carry the song without the aid of the lush orchestration that usually marks the "Lion King" hit, and except for a slight wobble at the part that goes, "It's enough for this restless warrior ..." she succeeds. Her sweet clear voice earns her the kind of applause that says, well done! good for you, and a few people, perhaps relatives, stand up to try and get an ovation going.  Despite potential relief from the hard seats, few bite.
     For the conclusion, the junior band is asked to join the senior band on the gym floor. "Grab a music stand and find a place," says their leader, as if this is a last minute thought. It's the time of year you expect "Jingle Bells", or maybe a cleverly-arranged medley of sprightly Christmas favourites, but with the uniqueness that has characterized this whole common event, we're left with the slightly suggestive "Santa Baby" for a coda as we climb down the musical staff and accelerando into the night.

Her own private Idaho

It's a terrible time of year to be writing about depression, but that's what has been coming up in conversations and news stories, such as CBC's the fifth estate investigation into the death of young teen who killed herself after being stalked for over two years by an internet predator who had convinced her to flash her pubescent boobs, and then carried out a threat to post the photo online when she wouldn't take it all off for him. God!
     A friend suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder, appropriately known as SAD. He's one of two people I know who use light boxes or some other device meant to replace the light of the sun, which has to help even the chronically downcast. Don't we all feel better on a sunny day?

     Someone whose desolation knows no particular weather is a young man whose mother was murdered when he was four. He has grown up in the house of his surviving, shell-shocked parent, but now that it's time to step into the world, this fellow hasn't a clue how or where to begin.  He hints at how lost he feels on his FB page.
     It's enough to make anyone sad, even those of us who were born optimistic. I don't know what accounts for that. Some scientists say it's a gene, OXTR. If we have the gene we are better able to cope with hardship: we are not only optimistic but have a healthy sense of self-esteem and "mastery". Nothing is quite as simple as it appears, of course. Even if you have the gene, circumstances could so drag you down that it wouldn't make any difference. And the opposite is also true, that even if you don't have the gene, you could well be able to cope because, for example, you have some close friends, a satisfying job, you're in good health.
     It would be great if all the variables could be calculated and consciously shuffled to give people who really need it a break, but despite the science, it all seems so random - luck, happiness.  That alone is bound to set off a sort of hopelessness. Apparently brains can be reprogrammed, though. The theory goes that if we expect something to turn out badly, we often make choices that guarantee it. We subconsciously begin selecting situations in which we are likely to fail.  If I were depressed and somebody told me to reprogram myself, because I was more or less the author of my own sorrow, I would be offended. Are you kidding? Making it a matter of personal responsibility would be even more depressing. A trap, a sad trap. Not as simple to escape as saying to oneself, "this will turn out wonderfully, I know it". Brains can be retrained in theory, but it doesn't happen quickly and it would be very difficult to accomplish on one's own. A symptom of depression is lassitude, not having the energy even to try.
     The grandmother of the boy whose mother was murdered lives in Idaho. She settled there after the tragedy to deal with her own grief and to help the boy. She never loved Idaho: if her daughter had not died in such a violent way, if she had not left a son there, the grandmother might well be living somewhere else. But there she is while darkness edges more deeply into the day as the solstice nears, in her own private Idaho, which shares with the Gus Van Sant film "My Own Private Idaho" a cast of depressed characters, especially the one who lost his mother.
     In a local store earlier this week, waiting in line to pay for my purchase, I overheard a woman talking to the shop keeper. "Difficult in the end... I have a video." "I'm sure it was difficult," he replied. "Yes, and those kinds of things tend to roll up at this time of year, too."
     Less than two weeks before the light begins to return, with the potential to make all the difference for these folks and I hope it does. Hope. If only it were possible to put that in a box, wrap it up and tie it with a bow in this season of darkness and of giving.

Wet Enough For You?

Rain pattering you to sleep, rain when you wake up, scalloping down the street, clattering like a spill of nails on metal roofs. In the occasional gust, branch shadows brush a streetlamp-lit wall. November storms.

     The streams are gushing; water running through ditches is staged by rip rap boulders big enough that the ruffly cascade appears contrived by a landscape artist. Rain falls, water sluices down and down, sometimes wrenching gravel out of road shoulders higher up so that a wash of small stones litters the lower roads. Rainfall enters creeks, broadening them into a fan of rills that finally empty into the sea.
     The writer David Adams Richards used the phrase "the slanting rain" so often that I can't think of New Brunswick without picturing men who need a shave ducking into some pool hall to get out of the weather.
     The Weather Network page has codes, two blue drops for showers; four for actual rain; a red banner across the top if there is a rainfall warning, which there were three of in November. 50+ mm, or two inches, and sometimes it came down in great floods or buckets. Bucketing.
     A BBC columnist asked the rhetorical question anyone in a wet climate might ask: if the Inuit, formerly called Eskimo, have 50 words for snow, why not 50 words for rain? In the list were some English-isms I hadn't heard, including tippling down, which connects the idea of hiding out in a pub to rain; and raining stair rods, some ancient British architecture reference, I presume. He did include raining cats and dogs, though, and a few other terms familiar to North Americans.
     Rain can fall in summer of course and feel warm, even refreshing, and there can be sun showers, that impossible meteorological contradiction that impels you to slip your sunglasses out from your rain jacket.

     But the rain I think of when I think of rain is the November rain that drills, or showers or teems down from skies that look as if the sun is a distant relative, the kind that visits only on special occasions.  The dialogue between chill raw steady rain and the slosh of waves against the ferry dock can make you feel as if you will never be warm and dry again, as if your skin is ineffective as kleenex between the watery two-thirds of your body and the environment. Other times rain drops so hard it can take your breath away as torrents spew from the low sky driving rivulets into hills and eroding the banks of creeks, including the one behind the house. Not too cold yet to keep the window absolutely closed, the rain does not come in, but the roaring creek and the rain wake me and I get up and go to the window in front and watch it sheeting down as if there is no space between the needles of water and the air itself. It's so heavy, it can't last. Thunderous yet without thunder, like the advancing army of Greeks across the plain to the gates of Troy. "As when the sea's swell hurls on a booming shore, wave after wave at the west wind's stirring..." (Homer) Like the the sound of thousands of hands spontaneously clapping. Pelting the gutters, splashing out the drain pipes. The street is coursing with it. How long can it really last? And then it does eventually slow, to the more customary steady patter, a sort of coastal lullaby.

Once in the far west of Ireland I stood on a high promontory and watched squall after squall blow in. I had started out in sun that shone on green, nibbled-down pasture where sheep grazed, and gleamed on the barbed wire meant to keep the beasts from the cliff edge. Then rose a gusting wind that forced me to grab onto the wire so not to be blown off myself, then a downpour that defied my anorak, then the sun again, and way out on the western sea, massing clouds began a repeat of the same cycle. During one of the intervals of sun, I hurried back to the road where I was scolded by a local for having risked my life out there. Needless to say I was soaking wet.

Huddled Masses Yearning....

Introducing the reforms he intends to make to immigration laws in the U.S., President Obama referred to the Statue of Liberty. "We didn't raise the Statue of Liberty with her back to the world," he said, reminding listeners of the pride with which the U.S. used to accept immigrants. But now, with the masses huddled along the southern border, or surging across it, not to mention those who arrived even decades ago and have been huddled somewhere outside the law, pride has turned to fear, to anger.

 

 Immigration is a problem for many first-world countries, especially at receiving locations where newcomers have to be processed, housed, given medical care. Political parties that favour stricter immigration laws are on the ascendance not only in the United States but also in Britain, France, Austria, and Switzerland. Italy struggles to deal with literal tides of Africans rolling in with the sea after perilous journeys. Nevertheless, war, gangs, tyrants local and national, withering poverty, and climate change refugees continue to replenish the stream of those who risk the very lives they are trying to better in boats, with the infamous coyotes, with gun toting vigilantes who take it upon themselves to patrol borders. You can't blame a person for wanting to improve his lot and the lot of his children, and in time, once the considerable tangles are sorted out, receiving countries are inevitably enriched. The language problems that plagued their parents are something the second generation - some of them stand-up comics - only joke about. You get your Apple Stores in which the only similar characteristics among staff are the red t-shirts with the white apples below faces of various skin shades and features: One old white guy, many young south and east Asians, a couple of blacks, a man who might be related to Mohammed Morsi. Nearby, across from the central branch of the Vancouver Library, whose collection includes books and journals in 16 languages - from Arabic to Vietnamese - there is a two-block stretch dominated by ethnic restaurants, including Ebi Ten Japanese fast food, SK Mediterranean Restaurant, Coco Noodle Express, Rolls Kitchen, Pasta and Pizza, Belgian Waffles, Creative Felafel, Orange Julius, Chopped Leaf offering rolls with southwest, Bankgok, Greek and Mexican fillings; also Japadog, Curry Fusion, Papa Beard Cream Puffs. And that's just one side of the street. While there has long been a TNT Market on the outskirts of a gentrifying Chinatown, with Chinese junk food and a huge seafood department, and teetering stacks of pre-wrapped sushi to go, there is now the H Market, with Japanese and other Asian specialities as well as cornflakes and ice cream and a well stocked produce department a block from the city's main intersection at Georgia and Granville Streets.

Immigrants en route to Italy.

     Typical Vancouver. In Canada, one out of five people are immigrants and the largest percentage comes from Asia, although 200 different ethnic origins were reported in the last census. To those who worry about a national identity when the population is composed of so many nationalities, it's a leap to accept that our diversity IS our identity. But the late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who fostered Canada's multicultural policy during his time said,
     "National unity if it is to mean anything in the deeply personal sense, must be founded on confidence in one's own individual identity; out of this can grow respect for that of others and a willingness to share ideas, attitudes and assumptions. A vigorous policy of multiculturalism will help create this initial confidence. It can form the base of a society which is based on fair play for all."
     And offers plenty of eating out choices. My daughter recently fantasized about living in a small town. She wants a quieter life, but doesn't think she can give up ethnic food. Funny how acceptance starts with taste. How the effects of immigration are something we often experience first by literally swallowing them.
     Two images from one day: The owner of the local Chinese restaurant, Ming, hand in front of her mouth, embarrassed as she struggles with the unfamiliar pronunciation of English words during a tutoring session. Later, I unwrap a new computer that also began its journey in China.

(From the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, second stanza)

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

- Emma Lazarus

The Play-ing's the Thing

There was none of the fizz of an opening night. The bar was closed, the lobby dim. Not even ticket takers waiting to take money and cards; only a lone attendant at the entrance handing out a two-sided sheet that detailed the afternoon's event. But when the house doors opened, there were about forty of us facing a stage where five music stands had been placed in front of five straight chairs. Soon the dramaturge, the person who oversees the acquisition and development of scripts a theatre may produce, came out to explain the program, called ReACT, in which works in progress are presented to audiences for the first time, so that the playwright can, well, gauge their reaction.

     Then all the usual things happened. The house lights dimmed, the stage lights brightened. An actor walked onstage and stood in front of the music stand that held his script and began to speak, and there we were, in his hands, as he began weaving the illusion that would hold us, or not; that would create a temporary world where characters revealed themselves and the conflict between them that would create the tension that would involve us, or not. It's magic, really, theatre. Take a engaging character, and there was one in this case, Joy, played by Susinn McFarlane, give her something to go for; if we care about her we will be caught up in her progress towards that goal. We will feel for her when she gets slapped down, and feel a gradual unfolding of contentment when she succeeds. If she has a smart mouth and unpredictable behaviour, so much the better, funnier, more dramatic.
     It is magic for the playwright too, to hear/see words he imagined alone at his desk take on life in the person of an actor who is perfect for the part. To follow the smooth or not smooth segues from one scene to the other, to see if he has made everything clear enough that the audience gets it, but not so clear that viewers have nothing to think about later.
     In "Comfort and Joy," by David King, the wild and crazy title character Joy, who was invited to share Christmas dinner with the parents of her son's new girlfriend, gets taken down a peg. Maybe too many pegs, some audience members thought. This response and others will guide the playwright through another draft of this script slated for production next year.
     Non-playwrights, even avid theatre goers may not understand the importance of programs like ReACT at Vancouver's Arts Club Theatre. With live theatre attendance in steady decline, the chances of getting a new play produced have gone from slim to spectral. But plays are meant to go "up," onto the boards, onto a stage where people arranged in front or around can see them. "If there's no audience, there just ain't no show," the classic rock group Chilliwack sang.  And so, because play-ing's the thing, there are these opportunities, more opportunities it seems to "workshop" a piece, or participate in a staged reading series like ReACT, than to have the actual production every playwright wants, an opening night where people arrive in their particular version of dress up clothes and the lobby is chattery, the printed program includes photos of the actors and their bio's, and a production history that might include, like the work I saw in NY this past summer, a string of "workshop" performances.  Although many plays run straight through now, the evening might be stretched out with an intermission where folks stand in groups drinking wine from stemmed glasses or plastic cups and talking about the first act. Of course the writer's wishlist assumes critics who will write reviews that are not only positive but thorough, insightful.
     From the moment a playwright picks up a pen or sits down at a computer, everything is unpredictable and that may be part of the drug.  Will the idea work, will a producer see its possibilities?  Will it get as far as a workshop and then a full production? Even with those major hurdles out of the way, it's just the beginning, because one of the enduring wonders of a live performance is that it is different every time, even with the same actors, the same script. Enter the world of theatre, just walk through the doors and you are part of the drama. Anything can happen.

Soldiers and wars

Remembrance day in Canada, Veteran's day in the U.S., Armistice day in Britain. Soldiers are being honoured today in many countries as they are every November 11, at the 11th hour, when an end came to the war that was supposed to end all wars. We know how that turned out.  My feelings have been uneasy about this day. Not about the willingness of the men and women who actually went to war, not about bravery I can't even contemplate duplicating, not about the losses families suffered and continue to suffer when fathers, brothers and sons, mothers, wives and daughters go to war and don't come home, or come home vastly changed, body and soul. No, instead I feel uneasy because while honouring soldiers, November 11 also seems to glorify war. It's a mixed message and my feelings match it.

Rising black wall of Vietnam Memorial with the names of the 58,209 who died

     One of my brothers, a former U.S. Marine, rides with the Patriot Guard in Arizona, a group that provides motorcycle escorts for military funerals. Through this activity he has learned some fascinating details about former soldiers, including the Navajo code talkers, whose job in both world wars was to transmit coded messages based on their own languages. He and his mates perform a kind service for the families of veterans. Another brother, also a former Marine, served in Vietnam. I know and love these two particular former soldiers and still I feel uneasy, because the problem is separating the soldier from the war.  Nearly 60,000 U.S. personnel died in Vietnam, a war that was widely declared unwinnable long before the U.S. scooted out of Saigon; that the Secretary of Defence of the time admitted was a mistake. Yet men and women, including my brother, were drafted to fight in this battle over political ideologies and criticized when they shipped out. Peace marchers used slogans such as, "what if they gave a war and nobody came?" A sweet, flower-child thought but erring on the side of oversimplification. It wasn't the soldiers' fault, one could say; they were serving their country, stopping the spread of communism, keeping America free. Choose your sound bite. However, some highly ignorant types actually engaged in name calling if not perhaps worse in the presence of those who returned from Vietnam intact and badly not intact.
     The thing is, politicians and dignitaries gather to honour sacrifices made in the name of "freedom," while freedoms are being cut left and right. Governments spy on their own citizens, arrests are made and people imprisoned as a way of stopping terror, whether or not there is any evidence for the accusation. Hmm. And what's worse is that while November 11 is a special day for veterans, the rest of the year they struggle to make a living, struggle to keep the demons away, to deal with injuries that changed their lives forever. The man on the streets of Atlanta on a cold Thanksgiving Eve. Neatly dressed, but hoping for a handout because, as he said, "you might have heard that the U.S. doesn't treat its veterans very well." Same in Canada, where there was renewed spirit and emotion at the National War Memorial in Ottawa this year because a young soldier guarding the cenotaph was shot to death mere weeks ago by a mentally ill man who had used jihad as justification. So, there was more recognition of what soldiers lay on the line, and that's important. But any more money in their pockets, any more help for the mentally and physically ill? That hallelujah day seems nowhere near imminent.
     More than hypocritical, bordering on criminal, is that to manage war these days, at least in the U.S. and infamously during the Iraq War, the government engages private security firms whose corporate directors have been involved in government decisions to go to war in the first place. War generates profits for them. Some of these same people might even attend Veteran's, Armistice, Remembrance Day ceremonies. I hope not.
     I like to watch veterans, generally quite old folks sporting vivid red poppies, gathering in rainy November weather, standing at attention, or marching. I like to think of what their lives may have been like; what mark their wars made on them, if they feel they fought in a just cause. Maybe one day I will be able to do this without also feeling anger at some of the people who stand in the grandstand, grandstanding as usual.

Men Who Read

Surveys show that more women than men read books, but lately two men have inspired me, Geoffrey, 87 and Jimmy, who is 26.

     At lunch the other day, as Geoffrey and his wife and I sticked our way through the tasty and neatly arranged contents of our Bento boxes, he talked about his interest in the World Wars. He grew up in London and his father participated in both WWI and WWII.  But it isn't his devotion to the subject that inspires me. WWII is an apparently endless source of material for fiction and non-fiction writers, some brilliant, some ordinary. New books on some aspect of the war every season, and in my own reading, I'd like to turn the page. So no, it is not what he reads so much as his approach to reading that stimulates. Most recently he has been working his way through Harold MacMillan's memoirs, particularly Blast of War, and also just finished Martin Amis's latest, Zone of Interest. Now he is going back over the Amis novel and making a list of images he intends to compare with The Iliad. He does not just consume a book, but seems to plot it on his perceived course of human intellectual and social development.  Considering how writers as diverse as Homer and Martin Amis described it, how has our view of war changed, is the question I think he is asking.
     Jimmy, on the other hand, is just beginning his exploration of the intellectual/social graph of our times. A theatre school grad, it was only after university that his reading stepped up. He became hungry to learn, hungry for books of all kinds and when he visited he would prowl my shelves in search of a title he recognized, or that piqued his curiosity. What did you think of this, he might ask, usually holding up a volume I had not cracked for years. So he has roused me to do a lot of re- reading, and to read more poetry, some of which he writes.
     We often agree on what we think is good. Dostoyevsky, for example, which was his Christmas gift from me maybe five years ago. The Brother's Karamazov.  I wanted him to read The Grand Inquisitor speech, something that had so influenced me. A few months ago he referred to that while we were discussing Crime and Punishment. We both have copies of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, which we read around the time his mother died. We both devoured The Goldfinch, although I stopped at the last chapter, which felt too much like summing up to me. End a book when it is finished, is my thought on it. Jimmy has nudged me back to Roberto Boleano, whom neither of us counts as a favourite, and introduced me to Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station. I've enjoyed my younger friend's discovery of Henry Miller, and we have both lingered in admiration over scenes and lines in Tennessee Williams plays. We plan to read, even if not exactly simultaneously, A Girl is a Half Formed Thing, by Eimar McBride.
     As for Geoffrey, after the waitress cleared our boxes and poured more tea he mentioned Giorgio Agamben, an Italian philosopher whose book State of Exception my older friend referred to as a way of explaining how governments can get away with virtual murder in times of crisis. Within a "state of exception" the boundaries of power are precarious and threaten to destabilize not only the law, but one’s humanity, as well as their choice of life or death.  Certainly a timely allusion, and one that applies to government reactions to real and perceived terrorist threats, and to the internment camps, stories of which are the awful and inescapable parts of the WWII books that have Geoffrey so hooked.

     My brother reads and my nephew, mostly crime fiction, and as a person whose life has been concerned with reading and writing I know many other men who read too, despite what the statistics say, so Geoffrey and Jimmy are not really the exceptions. Yet in the power they have to make me think, it's fair to say that they are exceptional.

Shelter from the Storm at the Travelling Book Café

My Travelling Book Café sailed across Georgia Strait to Victoria during an uncommon monsoon in that relatively dry city in the rain shadow of Washington's Olympic Mountains. No matter, the hostess, Paisley Aiken, founder of the Story Studio Writing Society, had chosen the cozy back room of the Penny Farthing Pub,  a perfect venue: warm, quiet enough to talk and listen, and with yellow light from the wall sconces almost bright enough to read by (a cell phone flashlight aimed at my page by a board member helped things along). The Story Studio is a non-profit dedicated to helping kids and teens improve their literacy by writing their own stories, and most of the Book Café participants were board members or Story Studio interns. As it has with other groups, the theme of identity that is central to my novel You Again,

Cover art by Steve Harlow

proved to be an incisive tool for opening the vault of feelings and stories about personal identity and how it is formed in families. This group of intelligent, mostly 30-something women first focussed on family position. Does the middle child always fit the role of appeaser? Is the youngest always the most spoiled? Who is/was the most influential, mom, dad, big brother? One woman, a self-described former cell phone writer (a technical writer who worked for a cell phone company and claimed credit for having actually written, among other words everyone scrolls by, the word "Exit") is the oldest of six siblings, someone her mother thought of and called "my right arm." While it sounds flattering, it meant that her mother relied on her oldest daughter for heavy house chores from the time she was six. Getting out from under "the arm" of this strong parent has been a lifelong challenge and something the speaker has been doing by identifying with work.

No doubt the parts I read from You Again spurred the discussion. I regularly choose a paragraph in which Lawreen, the oldest sister, discovers that she has based her self-worth on her relationship with her actress daughter. In a longer section, Annette, the middle child, ruminates on how it was to grow up with a single mother, how she felt the odd one out until she left her mother's house as a teenager and joined her father on his goat farm in Northern California. Later in the book, the youngest sister Elfie's sense of herself expands when she learns that her true father may be a pianist. Family position and parental recognition have come up at every Travelling Book Café, but as rain continued to pelt the leaded glass windows and the conversation rolled later into the evening, we started talking about how it often takes getting away, travelling, to discover who one is, and that reminded me of the First Nations tradition of a vision quest, which young people undertake in some cultures as a way of coming to learn their life's purpose. Paisley, The Story Studio founder, for example, travelled and worked with at risk youth in the Caribbean before she became interested in publishing and worked as a book publicist. Now she combines her teaching chops with literary pursuits.

The importance of place to self-definition also came up. This group included people from far off Newfoundland and Cape Breton Island, New York City, Colorado and they agreed that their places of origin seemed to have become more important to their identity after they left.  The same woman who had travelled to two dozen countries, often as part of her duties with the Lonely Planet Travel Guide, summarized the conversation by saying, "I think we all feel like black sheep."

The Travelling Book Café has turned out to be a kind of pre-book club, with small groups and a genuine opportunity to connect with potential readers. Many of them leave with a copy of You Again, and leave me envisioning a web of human lives connected by experience, stories.

Ordinary Rapture

It had been a tough few months for them. Her 80 year old mother Teresa suffered a stroke in Vancouver just before they returned from Colombia in June. They spent the summer dismantling Teresa's apartment and visiting her in the hospital. By October, he had to fly back to the Amazon, leaving her in charge of their North American home and the care of Teresa. One day it felt like too much. She called him, weeping, and he told her about the scene he beheld at Calanoa: a star-spattered sky above a bamboo grove jewelled with fireflies. In the black Amazon night, everything glistened, scintillated: he could not tell where the sky ended and the earth began. For her, hearing this description from a man, her man, who is more comfortable making images with a camera and a paintbrush, it was a kind of rapture.

So too, on a less celestial scale, a recent trend in the neighbourhood, an egg glut on a couple of roads just up the hill. It started with a blue and white cooler outside the gate every day at the end of a paved driveway, the money jar wedged between stacks of cardboard cartons filled with the largest, freshest, most delicious eggs we had ever tasted. What's more, we could hear the hens cackling as they skittered and strutted, pecked and scratched around the half-acre behind the house; we could feel the frustration of the German Shepherd guarding them from predators, barking from his own fenced enclosure. Those eggs were worth every penny of the $5 per, then $6 per we paid. Sometimes we were surprised by a double yolk! Word spread and the cooler emptied more quickly. Eventually a sign appeared on the gate: Eggs Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday only. Quel dommage.

Then, competition from around the corner. Another blue and white cooler, set into long grass beneath a hand-painted sign that looks like it says eggs's, but really says "eggs $5". Bits of straw occasionally cling to the eggshells, and business appears to be slower because you can often find your dozen at the end of the day. The local honey vendor further along and around the corner had often offered eggs for sale. Here the cartons wait inside an old fridge on the porch, with fresh vegetables in season. When the first vendor started charging $6 per, this vendor did too. Not the eggs's people, though. The sign still says "eggs $5".  Now, not far from the original cooler, there's another. More fresh, free-range eggs, these at $5 per, too. This may have been what prompted the first supplier to modify. Instead of only the giant eggs for $6, there are now cartons of small eggs for $3 per.  And sometimes there are cartons-full in the late afternoon. Individual farm incomes may be falling as more egg suppliers get in on the traffic, but with four vendors to choose from in a distance of about a mile, there is never a shortage of eggs.

Nearly time for the school bell, but instead it sounds like someone is trying to work the creaks out of a squeaky door, back and forth, slowly enough that it's actually a squeaky chatter. But loud, too loud for a door. I can just see the white at the top of a towering cedar, the distinctive head of a bald eagle that, like the great blue heron, looks more impressive than it sounds.

Thunder storms rarely occur here, but just after what would be sunset, if the sun were visible, lightning flashes through the window and there is that high cracking sound of thunder that makes you want to grit your teeth. Soon, stars on the street as heavy rain splashes pavement. One more flash. More of a pause. Thunder, then the third zag of quick white light and, beats later, a receding grumbling as grey clouds above the water shred, slough and separate, becoming lighter even as darkness falls.

Fuck, the Word

Fuck. Why is this word still so powerful?  In a recent conversation a woman got around it, as is common, by saying, " you know, the f-bomb." The "f-bomb" is now as common as fuck: everyone

knows what it means, and while skirting the vocalization of rage, contempt, disgust achieved by combining the teeth-on-lips f with the hard-k sound at the back of the throat, it acknowledges the force of the word it refers to. Yet the word fuck is so overused it qualifies as a cliché. I used to urge my students to give their characters, especially street-wise types, more original language. Every street tough says fuck, a lot; so do businessmen and lawyers who aim to appear streetwise in TV shows, and I assume, in actual life; and hipsters, and... everybody. Yet, despite its constant overuse, the word still works as a shocker, a strong word, a way of expressing pain, anger, frustration, menace. It is still prohibited by certain broadcasters, and sometimes accompanied by an apology, as in, "Pardon my French."

French? Sacre bleu!  That's an expression that dates from centuries past in France and is related to the sacred blue veil of the Virgin Mary. Sacre bleu literally means sacred blue, and is a kind of Gosh darn it shorthand for Sacred God, which isn't too bad either, at least not so much that "Good God" is bleeped on TV and radio broadcasts. I thought sacre bleu hilarious when I read it in literature of the 19th century, and of course in Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot books. Religion is also the source of choice in Quebec, where one of the worst things you can say is tabernac or calice, i.e. tabernacle and chalice, both words referring to the sacrament of the eucharist. Sacre bleu is no longer used as a swear word in France, and has not been for maybe centuries, at least decades. Instead, merde is the most common epithet, and putain.  You don't have to be Gerard Depardieu to know what merde means, and putain is literally a prostitute.

Swear words articulate fierce emotion (they also reveal adjectival laziness, as in "fucking this, fucking that"). Emotions are evoked by the force of a particular cultural connection, say a culture's relationship to religion, or to bodily functions, including sex and defecation. Interestingly, the relationship can be one of honour or complete disdain. If you take the name of something in vain, i.e. swear, it means you're perverting it, you don't respect it. So, if fuck is defined as copulation, can we generalize by assuming that we don't respect sex? Can we do the same with the swear words in French, assume that Parisians don't respect prostitutes, or shit? That French-Canadians who use tabernac do not respect the sacrament of the eucharist?

Maybe not. One thing I think we can assume, though, is that we often don't realize what we are saying.

"We just come to work here, we don't come to die"

They would never have heard the classic labor song, "We just come to work here..." if they had not attended the annual, late April worker's memorial day, and they would not have been there had it not been for him. Twenty-two years ago he was in his early 40's, working in a road construction plant, saving money to start his own business. Long hours, dirty work. Then boom, it was over. Hit by a Caterpillar front-end loader, crushed so that his thoracic organs were found extruded from his body. His heart lay on the gravel floor of his workplace.

Another death on the job, the ensuing dance between worker's compensation agencies, health and safety regulators, machine manufacturers, plant ownership, fellow workers, the union. Everyone felt bad, of course. He was a good guy. No complaints.

A state investigation into the causes concluded by placing some blame directly on him, for not having worn a hard hat, for example; but most blame on the machine operator who was driving with his bucket raised too high off the ground to see anybody, much less the man he struck. And, by association, with the machine he operated, which could be, and had been, driven in third gear, leaving the operator completely blind. The general lack of supervision at the plant was another factor.  A single fine was laid on the company, $20,100. The company appealed and won and ended up paying only $7000 in fines. That was it.

Except for his family, including his daughter, who was seven at the time, and would continue to pay the emotional cost.

In the U.S. in 2013, 4405 workers went to work and never came home. Comprising a big part of the total number were transportation incidents, i.e people killed by machines.

In Canada in 2012, 977 workers were killed at their workplaces and nearly 700 injured each day, most in construction and mining incidents.

The majority of these statistics come from workers compensation agencies, which base their fatality reports on the number of files they have opened for fatal injury compensation. The figures are incomplete and have never included deaths due to the cumulative effect of toxins, for example.

"The history of compensation for bodily injury begins shortly after the advent of written history itself1. The Nippur Tablet No. 3191 from ancient Sumeria in the fertile crescent outlines the law of Ur-Nammu, king of the city-state of Ur. It dates to approximately 2050 B.C.2. The law of Ur provided monetary compensation for specific injury to workers' body parts, including fractures. The code of Hammurabi from 1750 B.C. provided a similar set of rewards for specific injuries and their implied permanent impairments. Ancient Greek, Roman, Arab, and Chinese law provided sets of compensation schedules, with precise payments for the loss of a body part. For example, under ancient Arab law, loss of a joint of the thumb was worth one-half the value of a finger. The loss of a penis was compensated by the amount of length lost, and the value an ear was based on its surface area3. All the early compensation schemes consisted of "schedules" such as this; specific injuries determined specific rewards. The concept of an "impairment" (the loss of function of a body part) separate from a "disability" (the loss of the ability to perform specific tasks or jobs) had not yet arisen." (A Brief History of Worker's Compensation)

As it now stands, the fact that there is a state-sponsored worker's compensation system means that companies found culpable in workplace deaths cannot be penalized. This is referred to as "exclusive remedy".  Of course large and small corporations can be fined, but they can and do appeal those fines. The relevant agencies promise to more closely monitor companies found to be have been negligent -- as in the case described above - IF the workload is not too heavy for the limited number of inspectors. So much to do, so little time.

The principle of "exclusive remedy" was introduced in Prussia in 1871 and has been applied ever since with virtually no changes. Seems long past time to take another look at it. The worker may be responsible for his own safety, as all the public service announcements remind, advising people to work safe, but the outfits that employ them may make working safe next to impossible.

Fall of the Wild

Lucky in wild life the last few days of summer: the wet blow of an orca spouting, then rising to display its shiny black back against the uncommonly placid blue of Georgia Strait; river otters darting from sea to shore, holding entire crabs between their teeth; the ubiquitous black-tailed deer that prefer geraniums and roses to the forest fringe vegetation they have evolved to eat.

Whale watching, Georgia Straight, late September

Then the first day of fall, and fish! Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of cutthroat trout, coho and chum salmon nudging up streams to spawn. Except... at the end of the dry season, a single day of drenching rain was not sufficient to fill the neighbourhood creek. Walking to the footbridge that crosses it, I first heard rolling rocks and thought bear, because black bears live in the forest here; it is common to see purple-berry bear poop on the trails. But no bear this time, only a dry river bed up which a lone salmon was trying navigate stones from pebble-sized to small boulders. Just below the bridge, in a deepish pool, fifty to a hundred waited, finning together in a grey moving mass.

Katagiri said, "the fish is the water, the water is the fish."

Anyone who lives in the Pacific northwest is familiar with the miracle of salmon runs and they are no less dramatic for being part of the common lore. No drought here, but a parade of sunny days we celebrated with swimming, picnics, late night trips to the dock to witness two super moons. One of the best summers, people say, waiting in line at the supermarket cash register, sighing as the seasons change. Tell that to the fish, who would be too busy to listen, even if they could decipher human language. For as the days pass, more rain does fall, a steady day of moderately heavy rain pours into the local creek and others along the coast, but the problem is the culvert that runs under the road to town. That's the human language the fish understand clearly as if someone were standing there saying, No, sorry; this is as far as you go. Though they try to leap the fall of water gushing out, they can't make it. A well meaning friend nets a couple and walks them through the culvert to the other side of the road. But then what? And anyway, what is the duty here? To try to undo what has been done to convenience humans, or let nature - and we humans are part of nature - take its course?

Meanwhile, at the entrance to the creek, not many yards from the footbridge, more fish enter and stage in the channel, the small pools leading to the bridge and the ascent of the creek bed. Before they can reach the channel, some are caught in driftwood mazes on the beach and the vigilant sea gulls peck out their eyes. A pair of 13 year old girls try to name the individuals before they die. A dog

toys with a salmon carcass. This beautiful Sunday afternoon neighbours line the sides of the channel to admire the dorsal fins sparkling in a brief reprise of summer. A man enlists the aid of a 12 year old, and the two of them begin grabbing fish by the tail and hoisting them up and over the logs, perhaps ten feet to where they can swim freely, at least until they reach the culvert. Infected by the energy of the of the twisting, flipping salmon and trout, more people join in. Even a four year old manages to hang onto one. A man who was counting later boasts that he has moved at least 25.

As a fisheries biologist reportedly told a local fisherman, because this is an el nino year, the Pacific ocean off the west coast of Vancouver Island is as much as four degrees warmer than usual.  The fish prefer the cooler water closer to land, where glacial streams enter, or so goes the current theory. Thus the more frequent sightings of fish predators, like the orca that day in Georgia Straight. Like the humpback seen breaching ten minutes north.

This morning on the radio a notice from the London Zoological Society on the state of wildlife populations worldwide. The news is not good for there has been a 50% decline in the numbers of fish, birds, mammals and reptiles in the last 40 years, a good portion of it attributed to human demand on natural resources, including animals, but also the habitat that makes it possible for them to survive.

At home, the black spot in the middle of the room is a spider hanging from a new thread. In the morning I find it crunched up like a grey piece of moss on the carpet.

Out of the Closet

Fall, a new decade of life, and a novel, not new but on my mind and sitting in a closet, jammed into a big brown paper bag as a 550 page manuscript to reconsider.

What to do, what to do? Over 130,000 words, a big sad book; a serious subject -- death on the job -- hours and hours, days, weeks, months of research. What to do? Individual readers - not many; I've never been in the habit of widely circulating unpublished work - responded with enthusiasm, but publisher after publisher turned it down, until I decided to put it away.

And yet, it is one of the stories I want to have finished before I finish myself. Completion includes presenting it to readers, i.e. publishing, when it is ready.

All the changes in a writer's life. The move from handwriting to typewriting to using a computer. From fusty stacks in the library to easier on-line research with instant results.
Remembering my determination to become a good writer, making myself sit at my desk for at least three hours or 1000 words. The beginning of a discipline that came to be a daily necessity. Trying, trying again, amassing 100 typed pages I then pared down to a ten page story. Studying the words of writer/mentors like John Gardner. Reading Alice Munro, John Sayle's early short stories, all the writers... Sean O'Casey, Sean O'Faolain, Dostoyevsky - the humanity, the passion; so many great writers, too many to list, but those names jump up because I analyzed their work to learn from them: how did he make an unsympathetic character sympathetic? how did she achieve that structure and how did it serve the story, more than serve it, really create it? Thinking of language, aware of a tendency to repeat words (Avoid careless repetition, said John Gardner) Never thinking of potential readers, certainly not of book promotion unless someone else initiated it. Never selling enough books to become a hot property. Beginning to realize, and only rather recently (Yikes!), that that could/would be a problem for potential publishers.

Behind the curtain, at the place where I feel most at home, wondering if I should pull it back and peek out. Consider readers who like a little lift. Make it funny? Change my main p.o.v. character from a librarian to a stand-up comic or a marine biologist? A marine biologist could be funny. One publisher responded to the original manuscript by saying he was looking for something snappier. Would he like a sardonic marine biologist better than my slightly overweight Scots bibliophile? Perhaps now, after several years, I will find the manuscript itself overweight.

It used to seem that a novel, or story, once begun, was self-determining. That is, it became actual, an entity, with its own requirements to which the writer responded. Could be I have to listen more carefully to what this novel wants to tell me.

First step, open the closet.

How do YOU see it?

Point of view is one of the most challenging and exciting (exciting in the way that sitting at your desk alone can be exciting, something non-writers might not appreciate) tools a writer has to work with, and two recent reads demonstrated very clever use of it.

One novel, Seven Types of Ambiguity, was passed on by a friend and the other I picked up in the airport, for distraction. Of the latter, I was familiar only with the title, Gone Girl. It either already has been or soon will be made into a movie. The former was published almost ten years ago, in Australia, might be twice the size, and instead of working with two points of view, that of a husband and wife  - as Gillian Flynn does in her psychological thriller - Elliot Perlman, whose more slowly-paced work is a literary psychological thriller, juggles seven perspectives: a psychiatrist, his sensitive and possibly dangerous patient, the patient's ex-girlfriend, the patient's ex-girlfriend's husband, the prostitute girl-friend of the patient,  a stock analyst, Mitch, and, finally, the psychiatrist's daughter.

Point of view is a central consideration when I begin any work. My last novel, You Again, which is not a psychological thriller, uses the standpoints of a mother, three daughters and a grandson to complete the family saga that began with Shinny's Girls. I also played with point of view in a non-fiction book, The Private Eye: Observing Snow Geese, because I wanted to deliberately explore how a given reality, in that case, the race of snow geese that annually migrate from Wrangel Island in Alaska to the coast of Washington and British Columbia, is constructed by the subjectivity of the humans that interact with it. It's fun to think about such things and writing is a good way to explore thoughts.

In their novels, Perlman and Flynn in effect ask the reader, what's really happening here, how do YOU see it? Of course both situations are  invented, the case of the kidnapped wife and the kidnapped boy, neither of them really kidnapped as it turns out. And the books have different ambitions. Flynn is crafty, never failing to entertain the reader with a twist, a sharp phrase, an insight that feels piercingly honest. Yet, by the end, I felt victimized by so much contrivance, such A-plus student wizardry. As the chapters became shorter and the characters almost seemed to meld - and I got it, her obvious purpose - it felt as if my neck were sore from being yanked this way and that for so many pages. Good distracting plane reading, though. She's a smart writer, and an excellent plotter, and knows how to keep her readers guessing.

Nevertheless, I preferred Perlman's more thoughtful use of point of view, how the first person narratives not only revealed the narrators, but also shed surprising, sometimes harsh, sometimes beneficent light on the other characters. Through this large, compelling novel, my sense of the situation expanded like intricate paper puzzles do. Trying to understand the bit of human life he presented by viewing it from various angles reinforced the difficulty of sorting through the complexity of the human predicament. As well as being an imaginative literary take on the story, Perlman's multiple point of view approach had a broader, thematic purpose, which, from my vantage point, was ultimately more intriguing and satisfying. Not that he achieved a perfect novel. Both he and Flynn chose their characters to represent or critique certain contemporary social issues, and the Aussie occasionally got carried away setting those up. Still, in the words of Samuel Beckett, "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." That's how I see it, too.